Electronic communications among users of computing devices are common. Examples of technologies enabling such communications include electronic mail (email), instant messaging (IM), short messaging service (SMS), and multimedia messaging service (MMS), among others. Each of these technologies has certain advantages and disadvantages. Email, for example, enables communications between multiple users, and the communications are often not conducted in real-time. However, email generally requires access to the Internet. IM is similar to email, but differs primarily in that conversations happen in real-time. SMS is used primarily to send brief messages with mobile computing devices, but the cost of transmission can be costly.
With existing systems, services from a given communications provider are incompatible with services from other providers. As such, to transmit and receive communications on different communication technologies, the user opens separate applications to connect with services that support the different communication technologies. For example, if the user wants to communicate with one or more other users via, for example, IM, SMS, and email at the same time, the user is forced to execute three separate applications and monitor three communication streams. Such existing systems are inefficient and complicate the user experience.